


The Recipe Beat

by d__T



Series: Going Straight to Hell on Transcon 1 [1]
Category: Mad Max(1979)
Genre: Diabano's Mum takes no shit and loves her son, The Sun City Light, remembering things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 10:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5124395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T





	The Recipe Beat

“Put me on the crime beat.” She leans over the desk, hands on the edge of it. “Instead of whatever-the-shit this is.”

“Ms. Alexander. Please, it’ll be too much for you to have to report when he turns up dead.”

She snorts. “Don’t you tell me what’ll be ‘ _too much’_  for me to handle.” She leans back, takes her hands off the desk. “He’s been gone five weeks. He’s fine.”

Nevermind that he comes back at the latest, every three weeks. With little gifts for his mum and sister: shells for the shotgun leaning behind the door, treats and trinkets and tales from far away places. He cares about them, as much as he can’t seem to stay still for more than a couple of weeks. Nevermind that the last time he’d come back, he’d been wearing a different-but-not-new jacket, a jacket that didn’t quite fit and had a hatchet with the handle stained dark tucked through his belt.

But he always comes home, motorcycle parked behind the house and a bound in his steps. Home, and never through the hospital or the morgue first.

It’s two weeks before she wears her boss down under her sensibly heeled shoes and gets put on the crime beat of The Sun City Light. 

She quickly becomes their most contested reporter on the beat; digging into the why behind the atrocities and the blood on the roads and the pain held in the hands of the nation’s youth. People didn’t very much like to have their hearts moved in  _favor_  of the perpetrators, didn’t like to see the victims in their full humanity. But her stories sold, and sold well, her words gripping and her underlying narrative a trap.

Seven weeks, and there’s no sign of him.

To console her boss, she writes the occasional advice and recipe column. But they’re no longer geared at housewives, but instead feature foods that can be cooked with ease over campstoves and fires. Her boss is not entertained, but publishes anyway.

Eleven weeks, and the first victim with what is clearly ax wounds shows up in the hospital. He says there’s others and she reports with a numb feeling in her heart.

Weeks later, another shows up in the morgue. The victim is,  _was_  high ranking in one of the city mobs. The Boss isn’t ever seen from again. She knows with certainty that most of the deaths do not show up in the system, only the bush.

Months go by as she documents the end of the world, passes the threads of life and death of people she never knew through her fingers. Memorializes them. And then the kid who works out of the broom closet (downsizing, you know) comes in with an interview and a  _photograph._ She clutches the photograph jealously when the kid offers it to her. In it, a man with hair lighter than her son’s but with his face and jacket leans against a motorcycle. He’s smiling.


End file.
